move, for he found Regnault de Chartres and some more of
the King's pet rascals there trying their best to disperse the army, and
crippling all the efforts of Joan's generals to head it for Orleans. They
were a fine lot, those miscreants. They turned their attention to Dunois
now, but he had balked Joan once, with unpleasant results to himself, and
was not minded to meddle in that way again. He soon had the army moving.

Chapter 15 My Exquisite Poem Goes to Smash

WE OF the personal staff were in fairyland now, during the few days that
we waited for the return of the army. We went into society. To our two
knights this was not a novelty, but to us young villagers it was a new
and wonderful life. Any position of any sort near the person of the Maid
of Vaucouleurs conferred high distinction upon the holder and caused his
society to be courted; and so the D'Arc brothers, and Noel, and the
Paladin, humble peasants at home, were gentlemen here, personages of
weight and influence. It was fine to see how soon their country
diffidences and awkwardnesses melted away under this pleasant sun of
deference and disappeared, and how lightly and easily they took to their
new atmosphere. The Paladin was as happy as it was possible for any one
in this earth to be. His tongue went all the time, and daily he got new
delight out of hearing himself talk. He began to enlarge his ancestry and
spread it out all around, and ennoble it right and left, and it was not
long until it consisted almost entirely of dukes. He worked up his old
battles and tricked them out with fresh splendors; also with new terrors,
for he added artillery now. We had seen cannon for the first time at
Blois--a few pieces--here there was plenty of it, and now and then we had
the impressive spectacle of a huge English bastille hidden from sight in
a mountain of smoke from its own guns, with lances of red flame darting
through it; and this grand picture, along with the quaking thunders
pounding away in the heart of it, inflamed the Paladin's imagination and
enabled him to dress out those ambuscade-skirmishes of ours with a
sublimity which made it impossible for any to recognize them at all
except people who had not been there.

You may suspect that there was a special inspiration for these great
efforts of the Paladin's, and there was. It was the daughter of the
house, Catherine Boucher, who was eighteen, and gentle and lovely in her
ways, and very beautiful. I think s